Next week GEMS is organising a talk by Angelo Lombardo on Tesauro’s Cannocchiale Aristotelico.
Monday 23rd of February at 4pm
Camelot (room 3.30, Blandijnberg 2, Campus Boekentoren)
Abstract: Emanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico (1670) is one of the most emblematic rhetorical treatises of the European seventeenth century. Long regarded either as a baroque excess or as a theoretical defense of Marinist concettismo, it also presents itself as an orthodox commentary on Aristotle, while simultaneously unfolding as a vast elocutionary experiment. This project seeks to move beyond these partial readings by bringing to light the internal coherence, formal sophistication, and above all the distinctive truth-ideal that sustains Tesauro’s poetics.
By situating the Cannocchiale within the late sixteenth-century debate on the ontological and epistemological status of rhetoric and poetry, I argue that Tesauro’s work is not merely a rhetorical manual but a decisive intervention in a broader inquiry: can the rhetorician and the poet speak truth? Through a reconstruction of the classical sources (Plato, Aristotle) and their Renaissance reception, the project isolates the authorial profile of the early modern rhetor–poet, examining how literary production systems (imitation, tradition, inspiration, combinatorics) are reshaped by divergent conceptions of reality and knowledge.
This historical reconstruction opens onto a contemporary horizon. Early modern reflections on delegated and even automated forms of creativity anticipate current debates on co-authorship and generative AI. By recovering this authorial model, the project aims to offer a historically grounded framework for rethinking creativity, agency, and literary production today.
Angelo Lombardo is a PhD researcher at Ghent University, embedded in GEMS (Group for Early Modern Studies) under the supervision of Prof. Teodoro Katinis. His work bridges philosophy, rhetoric, literature, and musicology, with a focus on early modern epistemology and rhetorical-poetic debate.